Technological shifts in recent years, coupled with the changes businesses have experienced in this year alone, have given renewed focus to data protection.
The widespread adoption of working from home, focusing on remote exchanges between teams, has meant that working environments can now be exclusively off-site or even a hybrid – with teams rotating between the office and home.
In this blog, we’ll cover some situations you might be familiar with from your own working environment and try to highlight some of the ways data loss can occur so that you can be better protected.
Network Security: A Necessity
Many people don’t realise that their office networks often employ enterprise WiFi to add further security. When you’re working from home, you’re on your personal network which is unlikely to be set up with complete security in mind.
Ultimately, this isn’t the responsibility of the employee. In fact, companies need to remember that their teams are dedicating personal computing resources to their work and so should provide information, training and flexible tools wherever possible to support that.
You might be familiar with the embarrassment of leaving your computer unlocked in the office, only to return to find your colleagues have sent a company-wide email from your account as a joke. This is pretty harmless and also a good way to remind people of securing their workstations.
However, in the home setting, kids may have access to your computer and might be tempted to use it while it’s unattended. This isn’t malicious but unfortunately does expose your device and the data on it to risk. For example, if an app is mistakenly installed or a nasty pop-up clicked a data breach could occur.
Encrypted Connections
One approach is cloud-based Virtual Machines, VMs, that can be accessed over encrypted connections and don’t allow any data to ever be retrieved to a physical device. The cloud aspect of these systems supports complete remote access; but also has the added benefit of being highly scalable. This means that shifts in remote working, or changing health guidelines in specific regions, can be adhered to without interrupting work.
We’ve all made changes to the ways we work, including where and how, and we’ve done so in a very short amount of time. It’s important that we all embrace these changes and move forward – while maintaining awareness of the fact that ongoing changes in conditions introduce new risks and challenges.
To overcome these issues can be overcome, it’s vital we build processes to support these changes. However, while technology has many ways of helping, ultimately the best prevention is awareness.
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